Anyone in the habit of keeping journals––as I have been for many years––has probably noticed the advantage they provide when the need arises to confirm specific incidents or meetings from the past. Writers of memoir, biography, and autobiography in particular can appreciate such leverage.

The habit of journaling becomes especially useful when looking back and discovering you were part of an extraordinary occasion, or associated with an exceptional individual, whom you somehow failed to recognize for their greater value. It was only after Time placed within your hands the proper tools of knowledge and perspective that you could recognize the experience for the individual nugget of golden significance it was. The possibility of claiming such overlooked treasures the first time around is only one reason to consider making it a habit to recognize the innate potential for beauty and worth inherent in all things.

Connections Known, Unknown, & Rediscovered

As wisely as most of us guard against over-sharing on the internet, there are some ways––literally and figuratively––it functions as a supplemental journal of our lives. Celebrities who have seen extremely private photographs suddenly made public can testify to why that is not always a good thing. Researchers who have needed to identify leads to critical hypotheses proposing connections between seemingly unrelated elements can demonstrate why and how it can be.

I had given little thought to either prospect until receiving an inforapid infographic illustrating different facets of my literary connections. Most of what it shows has long been a matter of public record and knowledge. What, however, caught me by surprise were the associations it identified from my time at the New College of California in San Francisco.

Although it is a great honor to see my name beside that of such superb modern talents as the author of The Opening of the Field, Robert Duncan, and Black Mountain Poets founder Robert Creeley, the one name I would have expected to see was not there. That would have been educator and poet Duncan McNaughton, who established the school’s Poetics Program and with whom (as pointed out in my recently-updated literary profile) I actually studied. Yet, ironically, the New College of California poets identified do represent a legitimate substantial line of influence on the evolution of my literary aesthetics.

I say more in the pages of a current book in progress about important lessons learned from McNaughton after making my way to class following eight full hours at work, but for now I will focus on the dynamics of reclaiming contexts and meanings. Since I was only one of many that McNaughton taught at New College, it is unlikely that he would remember me as well as I remember him. Still, while revisiting this period in my life to complete the noted work in progress, I have been greatly inspired to read online about his more recent literary activities and publications.

Rewilding Poetry

Seeing someone who served as your mentor decades ago continuing to burn his literary candles at both ends in 2015 has a way of obliterating any excuses you might want to latch onto for not completing challenging work. In this case, I was particularly intrigued when I came across a piece titled “Rewilding Poetry,” by Canadian poet Sharon Thesen, in which she discusses an aspect of McNaughton’s poetics that runs parallel to recent observations of my own:

“What San Francisco poet Duncan McNaughton referred to as ‘sweetness of heart’ strikes me as a possibly interesting move toward a re-wilding that I believe is constantly trying to take place anyway.Sweetness of heart, McNaughton says, is ‘what is really common to our desirous souls, the quality which overcomes all barriers in order to circulate anew the heart’s creative feeling among men and women, who have more than enough reason to despair.’To radically expand the field of feeling seems an unintended ongoing work of any poetic practice of the wild.” –– (Sharon Thesen, Rewilding Poetry, 2015 Cascadia Poetry Festival)

The term “rewilding poetry” was new to me until I read Thesen’s essay (she actually expresses a preference for the phrase “re-worlding poetry”). However, the essence of the concept is one I began contemplating after the late Ja A. Jahannes edited and published Black Gold: An Anthology of Black Poetry.

Jahannes looked to a strategy of demographic inclusiveness to practice rewilding poetry after noting, like Amiri Baraka before him, the sterility some would impose upon contemporary poetry through an institutionalization characterized by elitist exclusion. Impressive intellects, and sometimes even seductively beautiful minds, may still be found periodically within such superbly-positioned chambers but any “sweetness of heart” tends to be less readily available.

An Exercise in Mindfulness

The names of the late Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera, the phenomenal writer Henry Dumas, and the great jazzmaster Sun Ra are also linked to mine on the inforapid graphic. The connections here are primarily through various reviews and essays written by me and in which they are either the primary subjects or frequently referenced. In addition, I share with others on the graphic, such as science fiction author Suzette Haden Elgin and the brilliant poet Jay Wright, a deep interest in certain metaphysical inquiries and cross-cultural dynamics.

So why or how does any or all of this matter? Let’s call it an exercise in mindfulness regarding the nature of our unseen personal reality. Or to put it another way, and just for the sake of having a little wordplay fun, we can call it a study in dispassionate digital bio-contextual constructs. What it may mean more than anything else is this: the stories and meanings of our lives are no less multiple than they are singular. Any true understanding of them, even when rightfully claimed as one’s own––for some of us anyway––can take the better part of a lifetime.